How to create print-ready business cards with snapADDY and InDesign Data Merge

Ensure corporate design standards and automate printing with a snapADDY BusinesCards export to Adobe InDesign

Are you looking to convert your snapADDY digital business cards into printable formats? Are you wondering if snapADDY offers a direct way to export all business cards to PDF for printing?

While snapADDY does not offer a direct way to export all business cards to a PDF for printing, there is a better way to handle the mass-creation of business cards while having full control over your design standards with an export from snapADDY and a Data Merge in InDesign. 

💡 If you don't use InDesign, some printing shops directly offer their own design editors, where you can upload the data from snapADDY and design the cards directly on the shop's platform.

 

 

This guide will walk you through the steps to download your user list from snapADDY BusinessCards, format it in Excel, and use Adobe InDesign to create business cards ready for printing.

Step 1: Download the User List from snapADDY BusinessCards

  • Log in to the snapADDY Admin Dashboard
  • Go to the business cards management page
  • Navigate to the User List and download either the complete list, or a selection of users 
  • Click on Download as Excel

Step 2: Format the Excel File for InDesign

  • Open the Excel file
  • (optional) delete, rearrange or update columns as you see fit

  • Under windows save the excel file under as a comma-delimited (.csv).

 

 

    • Under MacOS, save it as UTF - 16 Unicode Text (.txt)

    Step 3 (optional): Format the url-column to generate QR-codes

    • If you want to add a QR-code to every businesscard, simply add a "#" before the headline of the url-column (see screenshot).
    • Now you can import the data in InDesign and the so-called Data Merge feature atomatically generates the QR-codes (see step 4).


    Step 4: Use Data Merge, to create and upload the Excel-list to InDesign

      • Using the Data Merge panel in InDesign, you can easily create multiple variations of your document by merging a data source file (CSV or TXT file) with an InDesign document. For example, use the Data Merge functionality to create hundreds of variations of letters, envelopes, or mailing labels quickly and accurately. Data Merge is also referred to as mail merge.
      • Follow the instructions on the Adobe Help Center: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/data-merge.html